Afterword
Over the past year, our team has grown from our three founders to over 25 people. In that time, one thing has remained constant: our values. We have worked diligently to articulate the values system we share, and to critically evaluate new team members, partnerships, and opportunities through a lens of “does this reconcile with our values”? We believe that if we focus on building a team with the right values, we can iterate our way to success, build almost any product, and, most importantly, build the trust necessary over a long period of time with our employees, partners, and community members.
In order for us to build and scale, it's important that we think through, articulate, and reiterate how we want to operate collectively as a team – and how we want to scale that value system. Below are some of our guiding principles as a business:
Real-World Problem Orientation
We believe that too many blockchain companies have been focused on capturing short-term value at the expense of their communities. We believe this approach is backwards and is antithetical to the values upon which the blockchain was developed. We come from a variety of backgrounds, but there is one common thread – we are entrepreneurs and business people who understand the importance of building around and addressing user pain-points.
As previously outlined, we have conducted extensive studies into the pain points of traditional prediction markets and identified several core areas ripe for transformation. We believe that by combining our innovative team with disruptive technologies like blockchain, we can bring forth a new era in prediction markets. By focusing on bringing long-term value to our users through the technology we produce, FORE Protocol aims to create a lasting and innovative model that will drive the industry forward, not backwards.
Decentralization
At our core, we share the same values that initially drove growth in the decentralized finance space. We do not view FORE Protocol as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (or DAO) due to structural management problems related to that structure (namely poor decision making frameworks and a precedence of failure), but rather as an organization with a team that implements its vision via a set of decentralized protocols that ensure accountability at all levels. We believe that teams should focus on ways to deliver solutions that remove centralization in real-world applications and problems, and our goal is to be a high-performing company that delivers high-quality technology products that mitigate user pain points in real-world industries. By doing so, we hope to be a catalyst for broader blockchain adoption.
Transparency
We have been in the shoes of frustrated users in the space. The world of blockchain technology is full of hype and misinformation, and when trying to make a decision about whether or not to participate in a given project, it’s tough to get straight answers from anyone. Not only is this unfair, but detrimental to one's ability to make informed decisions. We strive to provide ongoing transparency across our team, advisors, backers, and participants wherever possible. We intend to provide thoughtful and detailed updates on the performance of the protocol, broader adoption trends, and what we see as the path ahead. Ultimately, we want our community to share in our growth and participate in our journey.
Sustainable Incentive Structures
Incentive structures are a major point of contention in the crypto community. While many projects have tried to come up with sustainable incentive structures, in our opinion, they have all failed due to two main reasons:
Lack of real world problem orientation: There are too many projects that lack utility and whose products don’t address real-world pain points. Without real-world problems, these projects must attract users in other ways, namely by offering insanely high-interest rates (APYs). These rates are meant to be “teaser rates” but quickly have the opposite of their intended effect - they crash the token price and kill any traction the project may have had. We have a laser focus on the real-world problem we are solving and we will iterate, ship code, and iterate again to ultimately deliver value to our users.
Irresponsible inflationary structures: The most common incentive structures in crypto are not sustainable. They're designed to be inflationary, which means smart contracts can mint a native token and then remove them from circulation. The problem with this is that the minting process is subject to the same laws of economics (and behavioral economics) that everything else is. Teams forget this. Blockchain teams too often view the mint function as a source of value but they ignore the dilutive effect of additional supply. To make matters worse, teams fail to implement strong deflationary mechanisms which can drive authentic economic value to participants.
FORE Protocol is fundamentally different. We believe in a long-term, data-driven approach to decision making. We believe that analytics should drive all of our decisions, from how we design our products to how we market them. FORE has built a protocol and product to address real-world pain points related to traditional prediction markets – one that is fundamentally different from existing solutions because it offers a sustainable way to deliver value to users. Additionally, we spent many months designing a robust and deflationary validation model that proportionally removes tokens from the supply with incremental activity on the protocol to create a fair and sustainable way to reward participants, regardless of when they entered the ecosystem. Lastly, our unique rewards system for creators and validators provides users with alternative sources of sustainable income. We believe that incentives drive behavior, and that behavior has second-order consequences which create new incentive structures. Our focus is uniquely on building lattices of incentive structures that drive productive activity on the protocol to create income and wealth-generating opportunities for the community.
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